Many businesses today rely on chatbots to automate some aspects of customer service, typically due to their ease of deployment, scalability, and the assurance of 24/7 availability for customers. When reaching out to a customer service department today, it's highly likely that people will interact with a chatbot along the way. Chatbots today can sometimes leave customers wanting more, especially when an interaction is more complicated or nuanced. While chatbots offer efficiency and speed with predefined dialogues, there's certainly room to grow.
The reality is that the sophistication of chatbots varies widely across businesses and industries. Some are infused with customer context, while many others can't connect information, which can result in painful customer experiences.
The majority of chatbots operate based on pre-programmed behaviors designed by humans. They are often limited in language capabilities and can only automate the most common dialogues. As a result, their capabilities are limited to simple tasks like cancelling orders, triggering returns, answering FAQs, and resetting passwords, while all other issues still have to be handled by human customer support agents.
To make matters worse, when a transition to a human agent occurs, it's common for customers to be forced to repeat their requests in detail and answer redundant questions. These experiences not only negatively impact customers but also the employees who must navigate the inefficiencies of the siloed systems, often while trying to defuse frustrated customers.
It's no surprise that in an era where experience expectations are at an all-time high, the limitations of these chatbots are causing many customers to dread engaging with them. But these early iterations aren't failures; they provided crucial learnings required to build the next generation of chatbots: virtual agents.
The Next Wave: Virtual Agents That Actually Understand
Powered by large language models and generative AI, advanced virtual agents engage in a much more natural conversation, understand more complicated queries, and more seamlessly pass customer context to human agents if customer requests surpass their abilities, eliminating the need to restart the conversation from the beginning. These virtual agents tailor experiences in real time based on past customer behavior and can react based on context, understand nuance, and even identify emotional undertones. Imagine reaching out for support and immediately connecting with a virtual agent that understands the issue and context of the situation, providing effective support much faster than a traditional chatbot.
Trained to emulate organizations' top-performing human agents and built to ensure compliance with organizational terms, conditions, and policies, virtual agents can also efficiently handle tasks, such as generating detailed case summaries and initiating follow-up actions, both during and after interactions. This ensures a better experience in every customer conversation.
For customers, this eliminates the need to repeat themselves, but they will also have 24/7 resolution for issues that previously required human support. Meanwhile, human agents become free to focus their time where it matters most: handling complicated, high-impact interactions that necessitate compassion, critical thinking, and personalized attention.
The Transition to Empathetic AI Concierges
Looking ahead, the next phase of AI-powered CX will be defined by the ability to interpret emotion and sentiment from human correspondence. The virtual agents of the future will be able to emulate emotional sensitivity, solve even more complex issues through agentic AI, and become far more successful communicators. By this point, the virtual agent will have upleveled into an AI concierge—a highly-developed system that can anticipate what is needed and suggest a course of action rather than being reactive.
Many customers might prefer these AI engagements, particularly for sensitive issues where they want to avoid potential judgment or awkwardness with human agents. By integrating empathy with productivity, virtual agents are set to redefine customer communication in a way that feels both personal and practical.
At this stage, AI will coordinate the majority of customer service interactions. However, when a conversation becomes too complex or emotionally sensitive, the concierge can once again transition the interaction to a human agent, ensuring the caller receives the proper amount of assistance and care.
Contrary to apocalyptic narratives about AI replacing human workers, the technology will empower humans and amplify their potential in the workplace. By tackling regular and redundant tasks, virtual agents and AI concierges free customer service representatives to focus on complicated, nuanced exchanges requiring deep empathy, emotional intelligence, and creative problem-solving.
The chatbots of today are merely the first steps. The progression from chatbots to AI concierges isn't just a technological advancement; it will dramatically shift how we interact with companies in the years to come.
Peter Graf is senior vice president of strategy at Genesys.